Who are we? Prohlematising national identity1

While the concem with ‘identity politics’ has grown in recent years, there are few studies of the ways in which people order and negotiate their national identities. The study reported here focuses on the identities used by members of the arts and landed elites in Scotland in the assertion of perceived cultural differences between Scots and non-Scots. These two groups have good reason to be sensitive to the problematic and negotiated nature of national identity in a changing cultural and political context in Scotland. The raw materials of national identity, in particular, birth, residence and ancestry, are used by individuals in these groups to make claims which are sustained by and through social interaction in the course of which various ‘identity claims’ are made and received in various ways.     

The dementia narrative: Writing to reclaim social identity

The social needs of individuals with dementia are often not addressed. Impoverished social interactions can place the person at risk of being negatively positioned by others and without means to assert their unique identity. In seeking strategies to help these individuals reclaim their social and personal identity, we have turned to the analysis of published memoirs by writers with dementia. Selected quotations show that through writing it is possible for an individual with dementia to engage with others in a dialogue that creates meaning and forms identity. Writing renews an individual's status as a contributing social partner, provides new and positive roles, and introduces empowerment and control. The memoirs demonstrate that dementia can be a time of growth and that authors with dementia construct and project positive new identities, which are full expressions of personhood.     

Citizen Alevi in Turkey: Beyond Confirmation and Denial

Abstract Critics of the current national citizenship models argue that, although it rests on claims to be inclusionary and universal, it can never eliminate exclusionary and particularistic practices when challenged by those identities excluded from the historical trajectory of "nation building." Turkish citizenship has been a form of anomalous amalgamation since its conception. On the one hand, the state insisted on the pre-emptive exclusion of religion and various communal cultural identities from politics, while, on other hand, it promoted a particular religious identity primarily as a means of promoting cultural and social solidarity among its citizens. Contemporary Alevi movements, representing the interests of a large minority in Turkey, provide a new source of energy for the revision of concepts of citizenship. Alevis have suffered from prejudice, and their culture has been arrested and excluded from the nation building process. They were not able to integrate into the form of national identity based on the "secular" principles that the republican state has provided as a means of promoting solidarity among citizens. What Alevis seek is a revised citizenship model in terms of a system of rights assuring the condition of neutrality among culturally diverse individuals.     

"I know a place that is softer than this..."--emerging migrant communities in South Africa

Since the end of apartheid, immigration into South Africa has increased dramatically. Migration has become a volatile issue, with South Africans increasingly xenophobic and threatened by the influx of foreigners.
Simultaneously, the question of national identity has increased in significance, with politicians and academics anxious to capture an understanding of the evolution and complementarity of parallel identities and group loyalties.
In the rush to develop a better understanding of identity formation, the opportunity to examine the impacts of hostility on identity, as in the example of migrant individuals and communities in South Africa, has been over-looked. How migrant identities emerge, and how communities play a role in identities and in the survival of individuals, has been a neglected facet of migration in South Africa.
This article, constructed largely from interviews with migrants, presents a picture of the emergence of migrant communities in South African society and seeks to enrich understanding of the complexities of migrant society within the country.     

Love thy neighbour: Social identity and public support for humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid can be contentious. Should finite national resources be sacrificed to serve the needy abroad? Social identity theorists argue that identification with a superordinate group, in this case the larger world community, should increase individual support for policies such as international humanitarian assistance. However, individuals can simultaneously associate with multiple identities. How does the combination of world and national identities affect support for humanitarian assistance? Using cross‐national survey data, we find evidence that support for international humanitarian aid is highest among those with a strong world identity and weak national identity relative to other identity combinations, though even those with a strong world identity and strong national identity can be supportive of aid.     

Conflicting and Reinforcing Identities in Expanding Europe: Individual‐ and Country‐Level Factors Shaping National and European Identities, 1995–20031

This study examines how, within the context of the expansion of the European Union, various multi‐level factors circumscribe individuals’ national and European identity. Focusing on the differential impact of new opportunities that Europeanization offers to people with different backgrounds, we propose hypotheses regarding the effects of individuals’ geopolitical, ethnic, class, and national historical backgrounds on their national and European identity. Drawing on theories on sociopolitical identities, we hypothesize that minorities are more likely to identify with the European Union, but are less likely to identify with their nation and that more local lower‐level geopolitical attachments can enhance broader higher‐level ones. We also combine these individual‐level arguments with macro‐level theories and examine the impact of country‐level factors such as having a communist past, the duration of EU participation, and the levels of economic development and international integration. We test these hypotheses using ISSP survey data from 15 European countries for the years 1995 and 2003. Overall, the results support our predictions about minorities’ identification patterns and about the reinforcing relationships between local and macro identities in general. Our macro‐level analyses indicate different effects in postcommunist nations than in Western‐democratic states, indicating widespread disillusionment with the European Union in postcommunist countries.     

Speaking French in Portugal: An analysis of contested models of emigrant personhood in narratives about return migration and language use

I address how the offspring of Portuguese emigrants in France, Luso‐descendants (LDs), interpret their language practices and identities relative to models of language and personhood from their ‘sending’ society. Specifically, I examine how LDs tell each other narratives about having been identified as an emigrant in Portugal, based on French‐influenced speech. In telling each other these stories, LDs position themselves relative to two models of language and personhood. The first diasporic model interprets LDs' French as willful abandonment of an essential Portuguese identity. The second transnational model interprets LDs' French as the legitimate result of extended residence abroad. I examine how participants explicitly and/or implicitly invoke both models, through the relationship between narrating and narrated participants' language use. I conclude by asking about LDs' awareness of their simultaneous adherence to multiple models of language and identity.     

Relative Rank‐order of Salient Identities of the Japanese

How are multiple identities of Japanese people rank‐ordered? Previous studies on multiple identities almost exclusively focus on people in the USA. Little is known about the structure of multiple identities of people living in other countries. Japan is a good comparative case because it has both similar and different social contexts than the USA. Analyzing a recent survey of a nationally representative sample of Japanese adults, I examine how multiple identities are rank‐ordered by their salience among the Japanese. The results suggest that among ten identities, the most salient are the family–marital status identity, the occupational identity, and the national identity, while the least salient identities are social class, religious, and political identities. This identity rank‐order differs from that found in a comparable study of Americans in that the rank‐orders of national and religious identities are reversed. The observed patterns also seem to contradict an emerging line of cross‐cultural research that suggests national identity is less important for the Japanese than for Americans. Overall, this paper empirically demonstrates the fundamental dictum of symbolic interactionism that self reflects society, and suggests the importance of specifying and examining country‐level factors to study identity structures.     

Situating the self in global context: Reconceptualizing transnational and cosmopolitan identities

Scholars interested in the effects of globalization on internationally mobile individuals have tended to study this by drawing comparisons between national identity and transnationalism (i.e., connectedness and involvement in more than one country simultaneously) and cosmopolitanism (i.e., a sense of belonging to the world as a whole rather than a single nation). Empirical patterns generally suggest the pervasiveness and resilience of national identity even among globally mobile populations, but findings do show that international experience can bring about changes to individual identity. By comparing transnationalism and cosmopolitanism to national identity, the extant literature makes a tacit assumption that these identities are group‐based. The social psychological literature on identity refers to three different types, or bases, of identity: group, role, and person. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism as role‐ or person‐based identities, and outlines several avenues for research based on this reconceptualization.     

Minority faith schools as claims for cultural recognition? Two examples from England

This paper presents two cases of minority faith school claim-making in England and considers what supporters of the claims say about their hopes and intentions for the schools. The paper redresses a gap in the literature on minority faith school claims and on minority claim-making more generally, which has tended to present minority claims as expressions of specific religious group identities, whilst it has had little to say about what motivates individual claimants to mobilise in the name of such identities. From an in-depth study of individual positions in favour of the two faith schools, it is concluded that depicting these claims as primarily claims for identity recognition fails to attend to the multilayered ways in which these claimants discuss their orientations to the claims and the root causes they identify for making them.     

Maintaining identity in elderly couples with chronic illness.

With the onset of chronic illness, it has been necessary for these couples to evaluate and redefine their separate as well as merged identities. As each of these individuals sought to realize a mature identity, role adjustments were required. Although not every member of the two illustrated couples had been able to accept the effects and concurrent responsibilities of chronic illness, the nurse practitioner was in a unique position to provide guidance. By reinforcing the importance of healthy identity states, these clients were able to merge temporarily and respond to their partner's basic needs, exchanging a sense of mutual satisfaction, and then to separate into distinct individual identity states. A major task of the older adult is to re-evaluate identity in light of the roles currently being played in life. Through this process, a workable philosophy of life and death should evolve. Most older people engage in a life review of accomplishments and failures, seeking to integrate the diverse elements to obtain an acceptable view of their life's worth (Kaluger, 1984). Couples experiencing chronic illness must reconsider the consequences of this illness state to adequately formulate healthy individual and merged identities. The role of the nurse practitioner is essential in providing guidance for adapting to the life changes confronting elderly couples with chronic illness while maintaining healthy individual and merged identities.     

Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in "Masculine" Roles

Women's military service is the focus of an ongoing controversy because of its implications for the gendered nature of citizenship. While liberal feminists endorse equal service as a venue for equal citizenship, radical feminists see women's service as a rei•cation of martial citizenship and cooperation with a hierarchical and sexist institution. These debates, however, tend to ignore the perspective of the women soldiers themselves.
This paper seeks to add to the contemporary debate on women's military service the subjective dimension of gender and national identities of women soldiers serving in "masculine" roles. I use a theory of identity practices in order to analyze the interaction between state institutions and identity construction. Based on in-depth interviews, I argue that Israeli women soldiers in "masculine" roles shape their gender identities according to the hegemonic masculinity of the combat soldier through three interrelated practices: (1) mimicry of combat soldiers' bodily and discursive practices; (2) distancing from "traditional femininity"; and (3) trivialization of sexual harassment.
These practices signify both resistance and compliance with the military dichotomized gender order. While these transgender performances subvert the hegemonic norms of masculinity and femininity, they also collaborate with the military androcentric norms. Thus, although these women soldiers individually transgress gender boundaries, they internalize the military's masculine ideology and values and learn to identify with the patriarchal order of the army and the state. This accounts for a pattern of "limited inclusion" that reaf•rms their marginalization, thus prohibiting them from developing a collective consciousness that would challenge the gendered structure of citizenship.     

War memories across the Pacific: Japanese visitors at the Arizona Memorial

Abstract

This article investigates Japanese visitors' experiences of the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, based on results gained from fieldwork observations, questionnaires, and personal interviews. Japanese visitors tend to understand the memorial and interpret its significance quite differently from the majority of US visitors. Nonetheless, the memorial clearly functions as a site for enhancing national consciousness for Japanese as well as US visitors, as they become acutely aware of their difference from Americans and in so doing reconfirm their own sense of national identity. While the Japanese understanding of the memorial serves to de-Americanize the significance of one of the most recognized national landmarks in the United States, it simultaneously reinforces the site's function as a national memorial by crystallizing a sense of difference based on national identities and encouraging a historical understanding based on a nationalist framework.     

Narratives of "Home" and "Homeland": The Symbolic Construction and Appropriation of the Sudeten German Heimat

Sport is an important arena for the construction, maintenance, and challenging of identities. This article aims to explore, using a figurational sociological perspective, the complex inter-relationship between sport, culture, and national identity with particular reference to rugby union in Ireland. The theoretical framework for the analysis of national identity put forward here seeks to make sense of national identity by considering a series of key "processual" social dynamics to shed light and raise questions on the dynamic double-bind between sport and national identity. A case study of rugby union in Ireland since 1945 is employed here to demonstrate how various sources of evidence can be "triangulated" to help unravel the relationship between rugby union and a specific "nation." Rugby union (as a global team sport now with a recognised and established World Cup) is arguably the most significant sporting arena whereby the imagined community of Ireland can become "real." This temporary union of two politically distinct nations through sport provides an interesting context for the researcher of national identity. This context will be explored by considering "official" historical accounts of Irish rugby, British media portraits of Irish rugby union, and the views of contemporary international Irish rugby players.     

Ethnic identification and the project of individual identity: The life of Mary Ann wodrow Archbald (1768–1840) of little cumbrae island,Scotland and Auriesville,New York

A totalizing and privileging of ethnicity, to the exclusion of other sources of identification, in American historiography has created a tendency to conflate group identity and individual identity in historical subjects. While ethnic group identities are ultimately rooted in cultural representations and ideologies, individual (or personal) identity is the ongoing effort to maintain a sense of continuity. Personal identity assures us we remain the same person that we have been previously. The letters of a Scottish immigrant to the United States are examined to suggest the role of ethnicity in personal identity.     

Looking Forward to the Past: National Identity and History in Malta

Critiques of the essentialising tendencies of nationalist discourse are well established in the social sciences—particularly in anthropology. This article builds on the calls for a more processual approach to national identity. It focuses not only on the problematic essentialism of discourses of national identity, but also on their inherent teleology. Social scientists have shared with nationalists a view of national identity as a problem that needs to be solved, and in doing so have adopted a teleological view that assumes that at some point in the future resolution is both possible and desirable. Picking up on recent theorisations of identity, the article argues that identity is inherently irresolvable, and for this reason we are better off investigating not the content of particular national identities, but the processes through which identities are debated—or indeed identity itself as a category is debated. The article concerns national identity in Malta, particularly the role of historians in articulating the identity debates. It links controversies within the historical community to the distinctive polarities of Maltese party politics, which developed in colonial Malta and continue into the post-colonial era. Although initially concerned with defining the content of national identity, political and historical debate shifted in the late twentieth century to focus on how it should be defined—and indeed whether identity was a useful category for describing Malta and its people. The article argues that this shift from content to process should be acknowledged by analysts of national identity, who should revise their analyses accordingly.     

Identity Management among Indonesian and Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

This study examines how the identities of migrant domestic workers are likely to be endangered and how these individuals struggle to reconstitute them. It is largely based on an interview and observational study with Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers in Singapore. Inspired by the sociological discussion of Goffman and Ishikawa, the study reveals how each migrant domestic worker manages her identity in her specific social context. This study shows that domestic workers contrive tactics to negotiate their situations, given that domestic work is considered a low prestige occupation and workers tend to be divested of the usual “identity kit” to make up their identity front. Specifically, to compensate for their discredited status, domestic workers attempt to reconstitute their damaged identity, obtain a new identity kit, recall previous social and family roles, or anticipate a future identity. They also attempt to acquire new skills and increase their value, so they can identify themselves as more than “just a maid.” They obtain additional roles in an attempt to change how they feel about themselves, to alter the meaning of being a domestic worker, and to redefine their relationships with others either by individual struggles or through collective activities. This study also points out a possible pitfall of identity management among the actors. The mechanism of identity politics might lead to an erosion of value, alienation from other domestic workers, and a strengthening of conventional stereotypes and generalizations regarding ethnicity, nationality, and gender. In this context, how non‐governmental organizations play a role in mitigating the pitfalls of identity management among domestic workers is also examined.     

Constructing Transnational Identities without Leaving Home: Korean Immigrant Women's Cognitive Border-crossing

Literature on contemporary immigrants suggests that increasing volume of transnational practices foster identity construction across borders, thereby disjoining geographical space and social space in which identities are constructed and negotiated. While studies pay increasing attention to the linkage between transnational organizing of economic and political activities and that of identities, relatively less attention has been given to transnational identity construction of immigrant groups without high level of transnationalism. This essay documents the identity dynamics among less mobile immigrants, who, albeit their immobility, negotiate their identities transnationally by way of various identity practices to imagine themselves as members of multiple communities across national and cultural boundaries. Based on thirty in-depth interviews with first generation Korean immigrant women, the author examines mechanisms of identity organizing which simultaneously indicate a gradual adaptation to the U.S. society and resistance to assimilation.     

Introduction: Self in South Asia

The so called western, rational, individual, autonomous, self marked by freedom, potential and choice and deemed essential for modernity has predominantly been juxtaposed with the presumed collective, static, bounded, “identity” of the “non-west” and its inhabitants. Anthropological scholarship has thus been marked by its focus on the “identity” of its subjects (drawn from a collective and shared with others) instead of a self. Nowhere has this theorisation between the self and the collective been so fraughtly interrogated as in the Anthropology of South Asia. A common place occurrence in academic, policy and everyday discussions, South Asian personhood has been comprehended only through various collective categories like gender, kinship, religion, caste, community following the Dumontian holism that there are no individuals and only caste and hierarchy in India. The discussions of self have also remained understudied in historiography inspite of being intrinsic to the Indian post-colonial public life. Recently, historians have turned to individual sensibilities and life stories while others have argued that the self is a product of history transformed in a public debate. It is important to reflect on the methodological connotations of using such person-centred self-representations – narratives, novels, biographies and memoirs – which are often deemed to be inadequate sources of anthropological and ethnographic value. Theoretically and methodologically these articles on self in South Asia distinctly depart from the existing anthropological and historical literature by bringing together at the same juncture both synchronic and diachronic accounts in conjunction with psychic and social histories. In this volume we are interested in the practices and conceptual tools behind the self than a definition. The focus here is on the ethnographic examination of the self and personal experience, of the minutae of the interactions of daily life, on the dialogical characters of the self in South Asia rather than a “South Asian” self. The idea of the self becomes particularly pertinent within the shifting contexts of economic liberalization, migration, violent conflicts, consumerism, new media and the role of transnationally affiliated groups in challenging/reifying static, orientalised and essentialising accounts of the self.